Home NAS/file sharing solutions

[megarat]

Hey all,

How many out there are using home NAS or file-sharing devices?  What about consumer OTS products?  What units do you have experience with, and would you recommend any them?

I've had a 2-disk redundant system working as local storage on my computer at home (Mac), with the intention to eventually upgrade to something network-attached.  Well, one of the redundant disks died last weekend (so I'm, horrifyingly, flying without backups at the moment), thus the time has come to take the plunge.

In particular I'm leaning toward the Synology DS209 or DS209+II.  It seems to hit the sweet spot for my requirements, gets good reviews, and I love that you can run Squeezebox Server on that thing.  That said, I'm open to other considerations.

If you have any recommendations, let me know.  My needs:

• Must work with the Big Three (Mac/Winders/Linux) without too much fuss.
• Support gigabit networking.
• Support redundant storage of (appx.) 2TB.  (I.e., have a minimum of two drive bays for two 2TB disks.)
• Low (near-zero) maintenance.
• Will intelligently sleep/power save when inactive

The rest is frosting.  It doesn't need to be super-high performance ... sure, we have a pair of Squeezeboxes, but that's about it.  No need (now, or foreseeable) for HTPC, streaming media, exotic filesystems (e.g., ZFS), etc.  Also, I'm pretty facile with system/network administration, so geek-friendly units are welcome (although I'm drawing the line at building my own openNAS box).

[phillip]

I have a DNS-323.  2 bay, supports 2TB drives, and has GbE.  Cheap too.  I don't have any experience with these myself, but my friend is really happy with his Acer WHS.  Comes in either 1 or 2TB flavors, 3 additional drive bays, has esata as well for future expansion (maybe usb as well), and has a GbE port.  I dunno how well either of these work with linux or mac though because I only use windows.

[didjamatic]

I've been very impressed with the ReadyNAS (formerly Infrant, now owned by Netgear)

[kriminal]

You don't know what you're missing if you rule out  a HTPC (mine's in the basement wiring closed)!  Automatically strips commercials and at 3TB holds all the home's music, videos, TV, and automated backups.  Streams to 3 Squeezeboxes around the house controlled with iPeng on a iPod Touch.  Just plain vanilla Windows Vista on a leftover AMD something or other.

That "automatically strips commercials" thing is a primary reason why my wife loves me so much.  Oprah for example has LOTS of commercials.  iPad ready for all the streaming video apps that will be coming out.

nice!

[didjamatic]

You don't know what you're missing if you rule out  a HTPC

Do you use it as a DVR?  If so, are you on DirecTV by chance?  I have a hacked Tivo with a huge drive in it, but would like to have an all-in-one option for all home video at some point...  without expensive hardware.

I have 2 hacked Xboxes running XBMC that I stream video and music from my home server and that has worked well, but it would be nice to have one set top type of system that could do it all.

[megarat]

You don't know what you're missing if you rule out  a HTPC (mine's in the basement wiring closed)!  Automatically strips commercials and at 3TB holds all the home's music, videos, TV, and automated backups.  Streams to 3 Squeezeboxes around the house controlled with iPeng on a iPod Touch.  Just plain vanilla Windows Vista on a leftover AMD something or other.

I have several friends who are doing the HTPC thing and while I certainly find it impressive, (a) my wife and I don't watch TV of any sort (I mean that quite literally; we occasionally make exceptions for events like the Olympics or 9/11), (b) my home theater needs are met quite nicely via the traditional (component-based) means, and (c) an HTPC, to me, is over-complicating the problem past the point of diminishing returns.  I'm pretty burnt out of keeping computers alive and properly maintained.  I don't want yet another mouth to feed, I will never need to troubleshoot incompatible device drivers on a BluRay deck.

Plus, I suppose, (d) I won't need to keep a computer turned on and humming away in the corner of my listening room/home theater, adding white noise.  (Keeping the HTPC somewhere else would solve this problem, but alas, running an HDMI cable from the workshop or elsewhere is not a realistic option.  Although I could have thought of this back when I had the walls stripped down to the studs and was running cat5e.)

[EverythingIBM]

That "automatically strips commercials" thing is a primary reason why my wife loves me so much.

Wow rippy, love based on a box that strips commercials? Why don't you go buy your wife some flowers?

[Brian8bit]

If I needed lots of storage I'd probably go for a 5 or 8 bay DAS from Chyangfun. Or maybe build a NAS with the Sapphire AMD AM3 DDR3 mini itx motherboard and the Fractal Array case. Although I think the Sapphire board only supports 4 Sata connections. So maybe actually the H55 mini itx from Zotac, so I could use all the Arrays bays.

[British]

I've been using a Synology CS-406e for years.
I could be happy with a snappier interface, but that's just nitpicking...
Since I'm a bit paranoid, I wanted RAID5, and the torrent client was what made me favor Synology.
That thing is lovable, and I'm thinking about getting another someday, like a DS-410(j) or if I get rich, a DS-1010+.

I don't like those 2-slotters... low disk space, and low security (disk-wise).

[phillip]

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of only having 2 bays, I definitely want a bigger one with more drives.  Maybe when windows home server 2 comes out i'll look into building/buying one and using that.

[firestorm]

I have a Slimdevices Squeezebox that I picked up several years ago and considered using an NAS to store the music.  Unfortunately, they were both expensive and underpowered.  I needed something powerful enough to run Slimserver, and while a few NAS products were reported to be functional (i.e. not perfect), running a PC was far cheaper.  I pulled an old machine out of the basement, traded motherboards with a coworker, picked up a used PIII 733 processor for $20 and a 250GB drive for $99 (remember, this was 3+ years ago).  For $120, I got what I needed, and it just sits and hums in the corner, running Ubuntu.

FWIW, there is a PC recycler here in town that sells used slim profile P4 2.4Ghz machines with 512MB of RAM, 80GB harddrives, etc... for $65 (less w/o keyboard, mouse and screen.)  Perfect for an NAS, after swapping hard drives of course.